He was still swimming toward me when I decided I had soaked long enough.
I turned my dragon body in the water — a motion that displaced enough of the ocean to push him back several metres — and swam away from him in long, unhurried strokes, rising gradually toward the surface. I broke through in one fluid motion, the water falling away as I beat my wings and climbed into the air above.
I flew in wide circles under the sun, letting the heat and the wind do the work of drying me, shaking the excess water from my scales in great arcing drops that caught the light as they fell.
Below me, on the surface of the ocean, the man was there. Of course he was. He had surfaced and was watching me with the same fixed attention he had maintained below the water — his gaze tracking me through the air with the patient, unhurried quality of someone who is not in any particular hurry to catch what they are following.
It was, objectively, a little alarming.
It was also, I was willing to admit to myself in the privacy of my own thoughts, genuinely intriguing. There was something in the way he watched me that was unlike ordinary attention — focused and specific, as though I were the only thing in the field of vision worth registering. A young child looks at something they want that way. The candid, uncalculated gaze of someone who has not yet learned that you are not supposed to let people see how much you want things.
Something in my gut had begun to suspect, over the past several days, that the game of chase was entirely within his capacity to end whenever he chose. That he was choosing not to. That the chase itself was, for reasons I hadn't fully worked out, the point.
I didn't examine that thought too closely.
I turned back toward 'The Lady' and descended, shifting back into my human form somewhere in the middle of the dive, and landed on the deck with the particular ease of someone who has been practising this transition long enough that the between-state no longer requires thought.
"I will never get over that." The voice came from my left.
I turned.
The red-haired, green-eyed boy I had known as Ivan was, today, a girl — the same features, the same freckles across the same fair skin, the same vivid colouring, but differently arranged. Ivanna. I had learned by now not to find the shift remarkable; it was simply how things were, and Ivan or Ivanna or the space between those two things was always the same person regardless.
She was leaning against the railing with a jug in each hand, regarding me with an expression that contained equal parts admiration and envy.
"Every single time," she said. "Completely majestic. It's unfair, honestly." She held one of the jugs out to me. "I made tea."
I took it. The amber liquid inside was warm and fragrant, and the first sip moved through me with a comfortable, settling quality. I walked to the railing beside her and looked out at the water.
Near the horizon, a small dot was moving steadily toward the ship.
"You left the boss in the ocean again," Ivanna observed.
"Why does he follow me every single time?" The question had been building for days, and it came out now with a straightforward irritation that was, if I was honest with myself, not entirely genuine. "Every time I go in, he's in the water within minutes."
She considered this with the thoughtful deliberateness she occasionally deployed when the question deserved it.
"You could ask him," she said finally.
'I don't want to.' The response arrived before she had finished the sentence, which was itself informative. I didn't say it. My face apparently said it for me, because she looked at me, shook her head slowly, and returned her attention to the horizon without comment.
The truth of it, if I sat with it honestly, was this: I was either afraid of what his answer would be, or afraid that learning it would change the particular quality of the dynamic we had developed — the circling and the distance and the not-quite-pursuit of it — into something that required a more definitive response from me.
Perhaps the chase was something I was enjoying more than I wanted to admit.
The dot had resolved itself into the man by the time I finished my tea. He came over the side of the ship with the ease of someone who has spent a great deal of time doing this, water streaming from his silver hair, and stood for a moment on the deck with the particular look of someone whose patience has been tested in a specific and deliberate way.
He produced a brief, quiet spell. The rose-tinted warmth of his magic gathered around him and dispersed the water from his hair and clothes in one efficient motion.
Then he looked at me.
The look said everything it needed to without any of it being spoken aloud. The abandoned quality of it — the patient, expressive disappointment of someone who has been left floating in the middle of the ocean by a person who swam away from him on purpose — was so genuinely dog-like in its mournful precision that I had to employ some effort not to show any reaction.
"Would you like tea, boss?" Ivanna asked, with the tone of someone who has assessed the situation and concluded that tea is the appropriate intervention.
"Yes," he said. "I would love some."
His gaze remained on me throughout this exchange.
Ivanna collected the empty jugs and retreated with an alacrity that suggested she was, in fact, delighted to have a reason to be elsewhere.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked, when the silence had run its course.
"Why do you always swim away from me?" he returned, and took a step toward me.
I thought about it honestly, which was more than the question probably deserved.
"I don't hate it," I said, after a moment. "Your presence in the water — it reminds me that I have to come back. That I can't simply sink to the bottom and stay there." I kept my eyes on the ocean rather than on him. "That's what makes me uncomfortable. Not your presence. The reminder that returning is required."
A small silence.
Then I looked down at the bracelet. The stone caught the light and returned it in that particular quiet way it always did.
"What would happen," I said, in a voice I wasn't entirely sure would reach him, "if I took it off?"
His exhale was the confirmation that he had heard.
"I would recommend waiting until we have land beneath us," he said. "But if you truly want to try it now, go ahead. I'll do my best to keep us alive in the aftermath."
Something about the absolute seriousness with which he said it — the complete, straight-faced acceptance of a potentially catastrophic scenario — escaped before I could stop it.
I laughed.
Brief, quiet, involuntary.
"You laughed." He said it with the focused attention of someone who has made a significant discovery. "Look at me. I want to see your face when you laugh." I could hear him moving closer.
"I wasn't laughing," I said, too quickly and too loudly, and turned to face him despite my better judgment.
His eyes caught mine and kept them. There was no particular force in it — he wasn't doing anything, simply looking — but the gaze had a quality that made looking away require active effort. And the expression behind it, when I allowed myself to register it properly, was not the polished coolness of the merchant I had first encountered, or the loose, slightly boyish version that emerged after dark, or any of the other arrangements of himself that he showed in different circumstances.
This was something else. Something more settled. The expression of someone looking at the thing they consider most important to them, without apology and without concealment.
It made me uncomfortable in a way I recognised.
"Don't look at me like that," I said.
"Like what?" His voice had dropped slightly, the words coming from somewhere lower and less composed than his usual register.
'Like I'm yours. Like I'm the most important thing in your world.' The words formed and I chose, deliberately and with some effort, not to say them.
"I'm a married woman," I said instead. "Married to my mate."
The words settled into the air between us.
He held my gaze for a moment.
"I know," he said. With complete ease. With the tone of someone acknowledging a fact that they have already factored in and found insufficient reason to change course.
I stared at him.
"Marriages can be dissolved," he said, with the same unhurried certainty. "And a mate bond — if someone wanted it broken badly enough — can be broken." His eyes remained on mine. "Or so I've heard."
The first half of that I knew to be true. The second — I was less certain. In the entire recorded history of dragons, across everything I had inherited from Aiona and everything I had read in the Draga library, I had encountered no account of a mate bond being deliberately severed. It was not something that appeared in the record as having been done. It was, as far as I knew, simply not a thing that happened.
But I didn't say that. I looked at him, at the patience in his face, the absolute absence of pressure in how he held the moment, and I made a choice not to push back.
He was not crossing a line. He was standing close to one, but he was not crossing it. And breaking something — a heart, a thing that had been built, a living thing that had chosen to love — was something I had cause to be careful about. The last time I had let someone's love for me go unanswered in the hardest possible way, the cost had been enormous. I did not want to be the reason for that kind of ending again.
So I let him be.
If he chose to love from a distance, without demanding that I meet it, then I could make room for that. It was not dishonest. It was simply the shape of what existed between us, for now.
We were still looking at each other when Ivanna returned with another mug.
He took it, and drank, and some of the tension in the air between us settled back into the particular, comfortable kind of companionship that had become our ordinary state at sea.
"Call me Rei," he had said to me, early in the voyage. "You're the only one I'm asking."
I had agreed. It hadn't seemed to matter much at the time. Now I thought it mattered more than I had allowed myself to understand.